Reprinted from Kansas City Times in the Carlisle Mirror; April 19, 1878. The tide of emigration that has set in like a flood since the first opening of spring has become a matter of general comment, but so far nothing has been definitely known regarding the settlement of the various parties that have passed through Kansas City farther than that they nearly all settled in the State of Kansas.
Forty years after he emigrated from Pennsylvania to Kansas in 1872 Jacob Sackman wrote an historical and genealogical account of a later group of pioneers and their settlements, filled with several score names of settlers. Under the tide "The Third Pennsylvania Colony," it was printed in the Wilson World (Ellsworth County, Kansas) of September 24, 1914. With several editorial omissions and modern paragraphing, it is reprinted here from a copy provided by Clarke Garrett.{Editor's Note}.
Since Cumberland County was first settled, the Cumberland Valley has been a stopping-place for many people on the way to somewhere else, whether it was on down the Valley to Virginia and Kentucky, or, later, into the Ohio Country. In the decades before the Civil War, migration was continuous. As some people moved in, others moved out. Place names like New Carlisle, Ohio and Mechanicsburg, Indiana bear witness to the Cumberland Valley origins of many of the first settlers of the fertile prairies of the Midwest.
The Confederate invasion of Cumberland County in June and July of 1863 has left marks remaining to be seen 135 years later. All who are familiar with Robert G. Crist's pamphlet on the "Confederate Invasion of the West Shore-1863” know of the effort to fortify the higher points of Hummel Hill at Bridgeport (later Lemoyne).
Irving College, located between Simpson and Main Streets in Mechanicsburg from 1856 through 1929, once offered the same type of curriculum, administrative trends, and student organizations that existed at many women's colleges throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irving was founded in 1856, during the initial rush of female colleges, when no less than seven women's colleges were within a 50 mile radius of the county seat.
An account of the occupation and shelling of the town of Carlisle by units of the Confederate Army ten days before was printed in the Carlisle American Volunteer on July 9, 1863, in the Carlisle Herald on the following day, July 10, and in the Carlisle American on July 15. The author was S. K. Donavin.
While it may not be an historian's job to "praise famous men," it is his job to tell of men and women, famous or less so, and remember that they were human beings with a human capacity for the remarkable. Henry Heisey Brubaker—in the formal custom of the day, he always styled himself "H. H. Brubaker"—was an imposing figure in the Brethren in Christ Church during the middle years of the twentieth century.
In 1854 Americans took a detour from the road to civil war. It was the year of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which allowed slavery to spread into the formerly free Kansas territory. This act, the warfare between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas that followed, and the rise of the free soil Republican party, so inflamed hostile feelings between North and South that the firing on Fort Sumter took place less than seven years later.
Clarke Garrett, In Pursuit of Pleasure: Leisure in Nineteenth Century Cumberland County. Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1997. 152 pp. $37. 50.
John H. Light, An Infantryman Remembers World Wtzr II. Shippensburg PA: Beidel Printing House, Inc., 1997. vii, 157 pp. Paperback, $10.95.